I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held in Harvard. The programme is here. For background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-15 which are linked here and here. Blog posts summarising the talks at the workshop sessions will appear as followups below.

On the 5th of December I gave a talk at a journalists’ conference on what tradecraft means in the post-Snowden world. How can a journalist, or for that matter an MP or an academic, protect a whistleblower from being identified even when MI5 and GCHQ start trying to figure out who in Whitehall you’ve been talking to? The video of my talk is now online here. There is also a TV interview I did later, which can be found here, while the other conference talks are here.

Like many in the tech world, I was appalled to see how the security and intelligence agencies’ spin doctors managed to blame Facebook for Lee Rigby’s murder. It may have been a convenient way of diverting attention from the many failings of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ documented by the Intelligence and Security Committee in its report yesterday, but it will be seriously counterproductive. So I wrote an op-ed in the Guardian.

Britain spends less on fighting online crime than Facebook does, and only about a fifth of what either Google or Microsoft spends (declaration of interest: I spent three months working for Google on sabbatical in 2011, working with the click fraud team and on the mobile wallet). The spooks’ approach reminds me of how Pfizer dealt with Viagra spam, which was to hire lawyers to write angry letters to Google. If they’d hired a geek who could have talked to the abuse teams constructively, they’d have achieved an awful lot more.

The likely outcome of GCHQ’s posturing and MI5’s blame avoidance will be to drive tech companies to route all the agencies’ requests past their lawyers. This will lead to huge delays. GCHQ already complained in the Telegraph that they still haven’t got all the murderers’ Facebook traffic; this is no doubt due to the fact that the Department of Justice is sitting on a backlog of requests for mutual legal assistance, the channel through which such requests must flow. Congress won’t give the Department enough money for this, and is content to play chicken with the Obama administration over the issue. If GCHQ really cares, then it could always pay the Department of Justice to clear the backlog. The fact that all the affected government departments and agencies use this issue for posturing, rather than tackling the real problems, should tell you something.

I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held here in Cambridge. The participants’ papers are here and the programme is here. For background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-13 which are linked here and here. Blog posts summarising the talks at the workshop sessions will appear as followups below, and audio files will be here.

The European Court of Justice decision in the Google case will haveimplications way beyond searchengines. Regular readers of this blog will recall stories of banks hounding innocent people for money following payment disputes, and a favourite trick is to blacklist people with credit reference agencies, even while disputes are still in progress (or even after the bank has actually lost a court case). In the past, the Information Commissioner refused to do anything about this abuse, claiming that it’s the bank which is the data controller, not the credit agency. The court now confirms that this view was quite wrong. I have therefore written to the Information Commissioner inviting him to acknowledge this and to withdraw the guidance issued to the credit reference agencies by his predecessor.

I wonder what other information intermediaries will now have to revise their business models?

We had a crypto festival in London in London in November at which a number of cryptographers and crypto policy folks got together with over 1000 mostly young attendees to talk about what might be done in response to the Snowden revelations.

Here is a video of the session in which I spoke. The first speaker was Annie Machon (at 02.35) talking of her experience of life on the run from MI5, and on what we might do to protect journalists’ sources in the future. I’m at 23.55 talking about what’s changed for governments, corporates, researchers and others. Nick Pickles of Big Brother Watch follows at 45.45 talking on what can be done in terms of practical politics; it turned out that only two of us in the auditorium had met our MPs over the Comms Data Bill. The final speaker, Smari McCarthy, comes on at 56.45, calling for lots more encryption. The audience discussion starts at 1:12:00.

We have a vacancy for a postdoc to work on the psychology of cybercrime and deception for two years from October. It might suit someone with a PhD in psychology or behavioural economics with a specialisation in deception, fraud or online crime; or a PhD in computer science with a strong interest in psychology, usability and security.

I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held at USC in Los Angeles. The participants’ papers are here; for background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-12 which are linked here and here. Blog posts summarising the talks at the workshop sessions will appear as followups below. (Added: there is another liveblog by Vaibhav Garg.)